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One hundred years ago, Leonard Franklin Slye was born in Cincinnati, Ohio. His family later moved to the small hamlet of Duck Run, where they worked a farm that produced a meager living. Young Len wanted a lot more from life, and he eventually got it-as Roy Rogers, King of the Cowboys, hero to millions of American children and a star of both big-screen and small-screen productions. Roy began his storied career right here in Lone Pine, where his first starring film-Under Western Stars-was made in early 1938. We go into some detail on that motion picture in the article that follows. For better or worse, Roy's career crisscrossed and intersected that of Gene Autry, the screen's first singing-cowboy star and the top box-office draw of Republic Pictures, where both men plied their trade for years. In his 1976 book Hollywood Corral, film historian Don Miller recognized their unique connection and decided to cover Gene and Roy together. His essay, "The Men from Music Mountain," was of course included in the 1992 Riverwood Press reissue of Hollywood Corral. But both versions of Miller's invaluable history have been out of print for many years now, and we're confident that many people reading Don's essay here will be seeing it for the first time. Chris Langley, a former director of the Lone Pine Film Festival and still on the board of the Museum of Film History, has been contributing to Lone Pine in the Movies since we published the first issue in 2003. From that number-which, like Hollywood Corral, is long out of print-we have reprinted by popular demand his groundbreaking article on silent-era director Clarence Badger. Chris is also represented in these pages with his latest essay, an overview of the career of director Lesley Selander, a frequent visitor to Lone Pine whose Westerns shot here include the vehicles of such major Western stars as Buck Jones and Tim Holt, as well as many entries in the Hopalong Cassidy series starring William Boyd.This year, with his superb article on Brigham Young (1940), we enlist in our Writers Brigade a distinguished new contributor. James V. D'Arc, Ph.D., has been at Brigham Young University's L. Tom Perry Special Collections since 1976. He is curator of the BYU Motion Picture Archive, the BYU Film Music Archive and the Arts and Communications Archive, and also runs the BYU Motion Picture Archive Film Series.Jim is responsible for acquiring and assisting patrons with access to BYU's motion picture-related manuscript collections that include Cecil B. DeMille, Merian C. Cooper, Henry Koster, James Stewart, Andy Devine, Max Steiner, Ernest Gold, Hugo Friedhofer, Ken Darby, Jack Mathis, and the Republic Pictures Music Archive. Since 1995, he has produced limited edition original soundtrack albums from the Max Steiner Collection at BYU, with a total of 18 titles in print. He provided the audio commentary for Fox Home Entertainment's DVD of Brigham Young and can be seen on various documentaries, including American Epic: Cecil B. DeMille, Hello, I'm King Kong!, and The Ten Commandments: Making Miracles. Jim is the author of When Hollywood Came to Town: A History of Moviemaking in Utah (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2010), a hardcover book with more than 350 illustrations with behind the scenes stories and that also identifies locations for the dozens of great western classic films made in Utah since 1924. This is his second time at the Lone Pine Film Festival. He previously visited us in 2009, when he graciously allowed us to screen one of BYU's treasures, the classic 1943 Republic serial Daredevils of the West. Once again we're greatly in his debt, and we guarantee you'll enjoy his impeccably researched article.Finally, in responses to dozens-perhaps hundreds-of requests we've received over the last five years or so, we are including a revised and updated checklist of films made wholly or partially on locations in Lone Pine and the eastern Sierras.
